Charting the alternative ways to make light — four lenses on the Survey of Alternative Displays: a matrix, a trade-off explorer, a map, and guided stories.
These are qualitative affordances drawn from the survey's prose — a sense of what each medium is like to work with — not lab benchmarks. Think of it the way a painter weighs oil vs. watercolor, not a spec sheet.
Each scored axis runs 0–3:
A dash (—) means the source text doesn't say — an honest gap, not a zero. Every rating links back to the section it came from, so you can check it. Spot something wrong? Corrections via PR or issue are welcome.
Status tags: comparable means you could realistically choose and deploy it today; borderline means the technology is real but pre-commercial, one-off, or niche — treat its ratings as more provisional.
On sorting: equal dots mean the same tier. Ties are broken by rating confidence then name — so the left-to-right order inside a band is not a finer ranking.
scored 0–3 · more = stronger — not stated in the source borderline real but pre-commercial / niche Equal dots = same tier; order within a tier isn’t a ranking.
A rough, qualitative map — positions come from coarse 0–3 affordance ratings, so points are jittered within each cell and many ties are real. The dashed line is the trade-off frontier (the best you can currently get); the ▲/▼ buttons flip which end counts as "more." Hover a dot for details; click to open its full entry.
Guided explorations — each opens a live view with a short read, then leaves you free to keep poking. Every claim is backed by the same survey you can browse in the Matrix.